Blog Post

It is the hot topic of 2013 and we strive to see great examples around the web.
Content is part of SEO because it sends to Google fresh content signals and it attracts natural links.
On the other hand, it is part of a social strategy that engages the targeted audience in compelling topics. For the digital market, the content is in place for their SEO and social benefits but in particular to assist the customers in their purchase journey and engage them with the brand.

You will require a team with expertise in the industry and related online communities on the web. It can be cheap or expensive depending on the medium used and time spent working out ideas.

According to Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, the search engine is considering social signals to understand the authority of a website. Moreover the personalised search means that the results are profoundly influenced by search behaviours and activities in your extensive social networks. For example, if one of your social connected friends express a judgement (“like”, “following” and “plus” buttons are considered so) on a brand this will in turn reflect on your results. This is possible because

Social SEO means not just producing tailored content for an audience targeting specific keywords, it means also engaging a community that can become loyal to your brand and influence their friends. “Liking” is a simple click but also a way to endorse your products in the same fashion is a good review, which is a marketing step to get the customer buying. In turn, you will have to do awesome things to get users sharing and communicating with you.

Being social isn’t just managing social media accounts and seeing the traffic data being gathered by your Analytics package. The website need to be designed with all the characteristics to activate the social machine, in particular the following elements:

Social buttons If the content that needs to be shared is to send signals to Google, social buttons are a vital part of the social SEO integration. You could also perform some A/B test to see how different social buttons perform when placed in different parts of the page. Don’t miss the SEO part of this and include easy to grab embedding code for every type of content. I don’t see how a blogger can’t republish your content in their blog if this is valuable.

Social integrationFacebook has opened a particular section of the site for developers where it shows how web development can be integrated with their APIs. In particular look at the open graph and optimise how your website appears when shared on your brand ambassadors’ FB timelines. Social integration means also being able to see which of your friends already like the brand or are registering via the FB connect option.

APPS

If it is done right, a FB app can drive a consistent amount of traffic from FB to the website and amplify the messages. The Guardian reached a new record of unique visitors and page impressions for Guardian.co.uk in February, and the news organization attributes 30 percent of referral traffic to Facebook. That’s up from 2 percent only six months ago. The change is largely the result of a Facebook canvas application that lets users read Guardian stories and share them automatically via Ticker, Timeline and News Feed.

Not all types of business may benefit from such an expensive operation but by considering to create apps to drive traffic from FB to your site is a great solution to gather social data, engage users and drive traffic from social media profiles.

SOCIAL WEB RELATIONSHIPS

Social teams are collaborating with SEO ones to produce great content, identify and get in touch with influencers and share amazing pieces of content on the web. When doing outreach, the “link builder” taps into online communities and is related to the brand, offering amazing content to share. Social and SEO teams are learning from each of these processes and enhancing the results.

Moreover Google Plus Authorship makes registered journalists influencing the rankings in proportion to the authority of their publishers and circles. This means outreach teams will pitch G+ journalist and articles will be strongly connected to the publisher website.

The social team is now collaborating with the SEO team to produce and outreach to the community meaningful content that in turn will attract links. In fact, according to a study by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot, there’s a correlation between social shares and links.

When beginning to use Social SEO make sure that you have registered all social profiles under your brand name. After this, optimise these profiles for a great user experience and SEO. Why did marketers start to talk about this in 2008 and why are brands still getting it wrong? The following are key parts for optimisation:

Interlink all the social properties and the website (useful also for brand reputation)